I am a bestselling author and a freelance journalist who concentrates on man’s struggle to keep the state in balance with the American dream. My latest book is The Future of the Gun. I am also the author of The Ultimate Man's Survival Guide. My website is www.frankminiter.com. I am a former senior editor at Outdoor Life and a former executive editor for American Hunter (an NRA magazine). I still write for the NRA's publications and I am a "field editor" for American Hunter. This is a purely gratuitous title, but one I'm proud of, as I am a life member of the NRA. I mention all this because Media Matters has been saying I'm secretly an "NRA employee" to attack my credibility on the gun issues. When they can't handle the facts they attack the messenger.

What President Obama Doesn't Want You To Know About Canada

These cuts are real reductions, not just cuts in the expected growth of government as so often is touted in Washington, D.C.

To achieve this the Harper government did something you might more expect to see in the private sector. Clement made history in Canada by tying bonuses of senior bureaucrats to the success of government-wide objectives for reducing expenditures. Get this, about 40% of the bureaucrats’ bonuses were linked to a “Deficit Reduction Action Plan.” Yeah, bureaucrats got bigger bonuses when they proposed ways to make bigger cuts.

Clement explained, “Forty percent of this at-risk pay for senior managers was based on how much they contributed to the target of least $4 billion a year in permanent savings. This is just part of how we’re changing the attitude of government officials from spending enablers to cost containers.”

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s budget proposal for 2012 failed to pass both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, marking the third straight year that the U.S. has not had a budget. Obama’s last budget went down 97-0 in the Senate. The president’s budget was so flippant, even his own party voted against it.

In Canada, the government created the “Strategic and Operating Review Committee,” led by Clement to oversee a yearlong hunt for cuts and efficiencies. Their proposal led to the 6.9% decrease in the area of government spending they’d targeted.

Meanwhile in the U.S., the “Super Committee” created out of the Budget Control Act of 2011 was also a committee of elected officials tasked with finding direct savings in government spending; however, if you recall, the Super Committee wasn’t able to agree on a solution.

Of course, the Canadians do have an advantage here. They don’t have the checks and balances purposely enumerated in the U.S. Constitution to inhibit them. In fact, senior sources in the Canadian government who’ve met with Obama administration officials say their impression is that the White House is jealous of the Canadian government’s power to have their way.

The Canadian parliamentary system certainly does give a majority government more unilateral power. Just imagine if the Speaker of the House could pass legislation into law without the Senate or White House to contend with and you get the picture. (As I discussed this with Clement he was thankful they could make the changes, but I kept picturing Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) with her gavel and Botox smile.)

But the thing is, until 2010, the Democratic Party did have majorities in the U.S. House Representatives and the U.S. Senate. This is how Democrats passed The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the “Stimulus” bill) without Republican input or support. Whereas the Harper government has used its political power to trim the budget to grow out of the downturn, the Obama administration spent $787 billion.

And Canada got the growth!

Clement says, “Our Economic Action Plan is working. We have already seen the creation of nearly 760,000 net new jobs across Canada since July 2009. And nine out of ten of these are full-time positions.”

Now, while it is true that a lot of Canada’s job growth is coming from oil-rich areas, the Obama administration has again done the opposite of what the Harper government has been doing. While Canada gets barrels of oil from places such as the Athabasca oil sands region in northeastern Alberta, the Obama administration has reduced drilling permits on public lands and has stalled authorization of the Keystone Pipeline from Canada.

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